But for that the MoE officials would need to 1) understand the issue and 2) be not easily "convinced" by monetary or similar "arguments".
Btw: Auch wenn ich das Wort an sich nicht mag, ich glaube, es wird immer noch "Deutschland" geschrieben...

Back to the topic: No, I did not start with OO.
I started with a typewriter. (Yes, I'm getting old...)
Next was "WordPro 86" on a
KC85/3. (Sorry, German only.)
Then came "Star Writer" on a
C-64C.
At university we played with WordStar and Wordperfect, though I rarely used the latter.
After I got a 286, I touched Word 5.0 and later 5.5 on DOS. After I switched to Windows, I tried AmiPro 3.5 (a nice program) and also Word up to 2.0.
Then friends encountered problems with Word 2.0. I couldn't rescue their files with Word and also Ami Pro had to surrender. So I searched for an alternative and found Staroffice 3.1, which worked just fine.
Did you notice? At that time there was an AmiPro 3.5 (text processing only), Word 2.0 (text processing only) and Staroffice 3.1 (about the same functionality as now). There was
no Microsoft "Office", only Word, Excel and perhaps some Powerpoint - and they were at version 2.0.
However, instead of improving their software more quickly, Microsoft came up with a much more cunning solution: They jumped from 2.0 directly to 6.0 - and at once most people believed that Word 6.0 was better than Staroffice 3.1 or 4.0...
Please don't make the mistake to think that OpenOffice is "new", it is not. OpenOffice is just the "free" version of Staroffice - and Staroffice has been more advanced than MS products for a number of times. OpenOffice builds upon that, so it is pretty "mature".
Please also don't make the mistake to "learn Word" or "learn OO". Do you "learn Toyota"? Or "can you Mitsubishi"? Sounds stupid, right? We say "I learn to drive a car" or "I can drive a car."
But in Taiwan it's perfectly normal to say "I can Word." Please don't. Learn text processing instead. If you know text processing, you should be able to use Word, OO, Koffice, Abiword, Wordperfect, Applixware, Ragtime, Textmaker or whatever you prefer.
It's like driving a car: If you only drove one car in your whole life, you will get frightened by the view of another car. But if you really "can drive", it does not matter what car you have to drive, you will only complain that one car is more convenient, more reliable than the other. But they both can take you from A to B.
I do not use OO for the sole reason that it is "free", so I don't need to spend money on it. If there was no OO, I would go on purchasing Staroffice, as I did before. The reason is simple: SO (and therefor also OO) is better than MSO, has (since SO was created) always been.
Learn to "drive", and you may find the same...
--
"I am at a rough estimate, thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number."
"Er, five."
"Wrong! You see?"
Douglas Adams, "Life, the Universe and Everything"